I recently made note of a mailing list post that referred to dances done at American Civil War reenactments, such as the Virginia Reel, and couple-facing-couple dances like the Spanish Dance/Waltz, as "historically-flavored". I don't think the poster meant to imply that these dances were actually ahistorical; this is someone whom I'm certain knows better. But there's an interesting underlying point I wanted to expand on in this, which is that it's possible to have an entire ball full of historically-appropriate, accurately-reconstructed dances, and still have the ball as a whole not be convincing as a historical event. Because having all the dances accurate to the time period is not enough. There are at least two other external factors to consider: the geographic setting and the specific type of ball and ball attendees. A ball held by a member of high society in New York City is not going to have the same dance repertoire as a ball set in a frontier town in Oregon, even if they are both set in 1898, and a middle-class French ball would be even more different.
There is also an internal element, which is the mix of dances and the proportions of different types of dances. It's fairly clear to me that the most typical ball format for an American ball in the last half of the nineteenth century included large numbers of quadrilles (choreographed classics like the Lancers and Caledonians and some that were probably called on the spot by the ball's master of ceremonies), smaller numbers of couple dances, and a modest number of contra (country) dances, which included both ones "formed as for the Spanish Dance", meaning in a "Sicilian circle" of couple facing couple, and more conventional longways proper dances. This would vary somewhat by location and social class, of course.
Note that this applies only to balls which are actually attempting to reenact specific times and places. Events along the lines of "everyone put on a costume and lets dance some random dances" are not what I'm talking about.
To take American Civil War balls at reenactment events as an example, the poster was right in that the dances tend heavily toward super-easy contras done as whole sets or in Sicilian circles, since those are by far the easiest formations for inexperienced dancers. (Once again: experienced dancers forget how difficult longways progression can be for the inexperienced. It's hard!) There are fewer quadrilles, and, in my experience, they are never called, only choreographed. At balls for more experienced dancers, there are proportionately too many couple dances. At balls for less experienced dancers, there are too few. It's not that such programs are impossible, or provably wrong somehow. They're just...against the odds, like flipping a coin and getting heads twenty times in a row. Sure, that's possible, and it happens sometimes. But it isn't the norm. But precisely because it's not impossible, the "but they could have done that" argument is difficult to respond to convincingly.
Note that I'm not exempting myself here; I don't call many American Civil War balls, but I do one or two at Gettysburg every November, and their proportions are a bit out of whack. Over the years, I've trained my attendees to do simple longways proper contra dances and some other interesting forms (trios, four-facing-four, and couple-facing-couple across a longways set, as in The Tempest), but I'm well aware that the relative lack of quadrilles is a huge gap and that I do too many unusual-formation contras and too few of the classic kind. I'm making the compromises one has to make when managing a large event with a high proportion of inexperienced dancers, but I'm also making little compromises that keep the event interesting for me as a researcher and teacher.
I find it useful when thinking about events to look back at some of the rules my late friend Stephen Proctor, known in the SCA as Adhemar de Villarquemada, developed for his SCA household, which portrayed that of a late 14th to early 15th century French nobleman. I'm going to quote directly from his rules, which, thankfully, have been archived here:
- The Rule of Time: What we do must be documentable to the time period we are portraying. Meaning that just because it was being done in 1162 does not mean is was still being done in 1402.
Just because they were dancing "Hole in the Wall" in 1698 doesn't mean it was still popular in 1798. Or 1898. Just because something was done in California in the 1930s, that doesn't mean it was done that way in the 1830s.
- The Rule of Space: What we do must be documentable to the place we are portraying. Meaning that it doesn't matter if it was common as dirt in Poland, or an everyday occurrence in far Cathay. We are not, nor have we ever been, in Poland or far Cathay.
I understand the impulse to take a cool dance from some other country and pop it into one's ball program. And one can construct circumstances where that is appropriate: our ball is honor of a visitor from X and therefore we will do a dance from their country. Our host just returned from a stint as ambassador from Y, and wants to show us the neat new dances he learned there (this really happened!) We are doing a masquerade ball with an international theme and are picking dances to match it. People certainly communicated internationally in the nineteenth century, and dancing masters traveled, corresponded, and sent dances back and forth. Large parts of manuals published in the midwest around 1900 were plagiarized directly from English ones. Howe and Durang copied from everyone.
But if your specifically American ball contains a bunch of dances that rarely if ever appeared in America, well, that demands some rationale.
- The Rule of Three: In order to introduce a new item into use there must be three plausible references to it, preferably both textual and pictorial. Further those references must be relevant to the class and kind of people we are portraying. More references are always better.
Just because Elias Howe put it in one of his dance manuals doesn't mean anyone ever danced it in the mid-nineteenth century. Elias Howe put everything but the kitchen sink into his manuals. Presence there is not reliable evidence of presence in the ballroom unless there is other evidence. Including one dance that appears only in Howe is a mild stretch. Having several is ridiculous unless your ball theme is "Wacky Things Elias Put In His Latest Book". Sorting out which of the things he included fall into this category is a long-range project of mine.
- The Rule of Common Usage: Meaning that what we do must be documentable to the class and culture of the people we are portraying. If it's a unique or very rare item, the number of references found to it is irrelevant, and it will not matter if you find 17 references to the fact that the Emperor Charles had a mechanical bird. He's an Emperor. We are not.
Upper-class society in New York and Boston may have danced the latest things imported from Europe. Dancers in small towns are considerably less likely to have encountered them. This is the "Jane Austen probably never waltzed" argument; just because the uppermost of the upper classes were waltzing with foreign visitors in London doesn't mean the daughters of the gentry were doing it in the countryside. Is it impossible? No. Can we prove it didn't happen? No. But how many times in a row does your coin come up heads?
To quote Steve once more: "Most of the facts of your life should be believable and fit easily into the expectations of the sort of person you are trying to portray. That means no 'stolen by gypsies' stories, no 'captured by pirates while on the way to Prester John's court', no raised by wild Mongols. While the travels of Sir John de Mandeville may be amusing, they are not to be taken as documentation."
Too many ball programs are the equivalent of being the bastard daughter of a renegade Japanese samurai and an English merchant who was captured by pirates and enslaved in a harem after which she traveled to Brazil as a stowaway where she met a duke in disguise and became part of the French nobility. Sure, it's theoretically possible, and some people did have lives almost that crazy, but it's not the norm, and historical ball programs as a whole should have more coherence.
I'll keep on working on those proper contra dances at Civil War balls.
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